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If you’ve watched, read or listened to the coverage of an espionage saga unfolding in a Halifax courtroom starring navy intelligence officer Jeffrey Delisle, then you’re likely convinced that the convicted spy is the Canadian equivalent of the notorious British double agent Kim Philby. Such was the alleged breadth of Delisle’s subterfuge.

Philby, of course, was a high-ranking spy who was also a mole for the Soviets from the late 1930s to January 1963, when he fled to his adopted motherland to evade capture. The scope and human cost of Philby’s treachery have been scrupulously catalogued in the decades since.

The same cannot be said about Delisle. It’s far too early for that. But this hasn’t prevented reporters, pundits and academics from reaching for the thesaurus to spout conjecture in describing the consequences of Delisle’s four and a half years of treachery for which he was paid a paltry $72,000 by his Russian handlers.

For example, in a documentary aired recently on the CBC’s The National, Brian Stewart, a former CBC reporter and now Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, offered a rather apocalyptic assessment of the damage caused by Delisle.

Quoting unnamed military and intelligence services, Stewart told viewers that Delisle’s betrayal caused “astronomical, especially grave and severe, and irreparable damage to Canada.” In his report, Stewart interviewed New York University professor Mark Galeotti, who claimed, without any corroboration, that Delisle had access to “almost everything.”

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But in the same sentence Galeotti admitted that he doesn’t really know what and how much Delisle handed over. “The key dilemma is this particular case is that we don’t quite know what he was giving (to the Russians) . . . we just don’t now know what has been compromised.”

The fact is that despite all the ominous-sounding hyperbole, academics, the media — even the guardians of Canada’s national security, CSIS — simply don’t know the real, lasting extent of the security breach, nor the harm Delisle’s actions visited on this nation’s, or our allies’ military-intelligence infrastructure.

Indeed, on Jan. 17, 2012, just days after Delisle’s arrest, Defence Minister Peter MacKay bluntly dismissed suggestions that this nation’s relationship with its allies had been grievously undermined by the Delisle affair, insisting our allies retained “full confidence in Canada.”

And under cross-examination by Delisle’s attorney, Mike Taylor, CSIS director general of internal security Michelle Tessier conceded that the spy service doesn’t know what or how much the navy officer sold to the Russians.

This uncertainty prompted University of Toronto professor Wesley Wark — who appeared as a defence witness at Delisle’s sentencing hearing — to tell the court that, “To be honest, it is very difficult to assess the harm he has done.”

He’s right.

Despite the uncertainty, Tessier remained adamant. Delisle, she said, had caused “severe damage” to the spy service in large part because he possibly provided the Russians with the names of CSIS officers and sources, thus putting their lives at risk.

So, to be clear, according to CSIS’s director general of internal security, making public the identities of CSIS officers endangers them. Then one has to ask this question: why on earth did CSIS produce a bevy of glitzy, bilingual recruitment videos featuring scores of real-life CSIS personnel from across Canada that the spy service posted on YouTube last year for all — including presumably foreign intelligence agencies — to see? By the way, they’re still online. http://www.youtube.com/user/csisscrs

Oh, and to boot, the CSIS employees paraded in the videos use their first names and describe, in detail, what they do for the spy service, where they work and how vital that work is to Canada’s national security.

If you accept Tessier’s grave reasoning, then CSIS itself has put our spies at risk.

Here’s more. Years ago, I wrote a front-page story about a large group of former and current CSIS officers — dubbed the X-MP fund — that filed a lawsuit against CSIS for lost wages and benefits. I once had access to the names of every intelligence officer party to that lawsuit. I also wrote a book brimming with the names and photos of senior CSIS officers. With a bit of enterprise and knowledge of Canada’s courts, almost anyone can find the names of CSIS officers. You don’t need to be a spook.

This is all to say that in the many years I have spent reporting on espionage and intelligence services, I’ve tried to avoid making the kind of unsubstantiated conclusions widely being drawn about the Delisle affair.

Perhaps more importantly, I have also learned to be acutely skeptical of the often self-serving narrative proffered by government officials and spies.

It is certainly convenient now for the Harper government, through its justice, military and intelligence officials to promote the notion that Delisle caused “irreparable” damage to Canada’s security relations — a narrative it once rejected.

Clearly, Ottawa wants Delisle to be made a stern example in order to deter others from following in his soiled footsteps. I suspect many powerful officials are eager for Justice Patrick Curran to throw the proverbial book at Delisle and banish him to prison for life.

That’s their prerogative. It’s the fourth estate’s responsibility to challenge the malleable official story, rather than be a conduit for it.

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